As the topic of education (or lack of it) seems to come up ever more frequently in my comment threads and we seem to be losing sight of the fact that one of the great socially improving reforms of liberal and socialist politicians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the provision of a good standard of basic education to all, funded by government, I find it appalling that mordern politicians of all flavours seem to be eager to downgrade education in favour of tax cuts.
Amanda Macotte has posted an excellent article on the dangers of creating an uneducated underclass, posted at Pandangon: No Child Left In School
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The average American student is well-prepared to work as an entry-level employee in any of the various food service or retail industries. Why should anyone be alarmed?
Well, you realize that it's OBVIOUSLY the teachers' faults if the students can't succeed under these new plans, right???? Duh. It must be the teachers that can't teach - even though the teachers have no supplies to even teach the lessons (desks, books, paper, etc).
I'm going to stop there to keep from slipping into a full-fledged rant that would get you flagged and give me a migraine.
Ian, hasn't this been going on since the mid sixties? In the political arena I kept hearing the argument from Republicans that the Democrats kept throwing money at the educational system. Either or.. the educational system has been failing.
Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program has been an abject failure, punishing inner city schools, with their immigrant and minority populations, and their teachers for poor performance. It's called punishing the victims.
It is a complex problem. We spend more per student than most other developed nations, and have achieved mediocre results at best. Why is that?
I think a lot of the problem is noninvolvement of parents in their children's education. They are too busy trying to scratch out a living, often holding two or more jobs. Some of that is because of the rampant consumerism that requires all young families to have a monster house, a big SUV, motorcycles, power boats...etc. It's our culture, in other words, that emphasizes what we buy instead of who we are.
Now when a kid struggles, his parents send him to a tutoring program if they can afford it or complain to the school system if they can't. I remember, in high school, a woman coming in screaming that her son was eighteen and couldn't read. "Who's responsible?" she screamed. All I could think was that he was 18 - where the hell had she been?
Thinking back on what I just wrote, it begs another question. How does this really compare to the past? In the 40's and 50's, it's my impression that many children were working very young and just left school. Is the percentage graduating radically different? It doesn't keep it from being disgraceful but changes the question from "What changed to make it worse?" to "Why couldn't we make it better?"
In our school district, the children feel they've just been thrown in trash cans....
Therefore, schools in the Northeast who had the benefit of wealthier communities and more educated leaders, delivered a much better curriculum and turned out a more successful student across all economic levels.
The South and frontier towns did not as many people in the middle/upper classes and were more dominated by landowner/planters who owned most of the land and did not see the need to educate the lower class white laborer, nor (god forbid) the black slave or freedman after the Civil War. They were also influenced greatly by fundamentalist religious groups who are naturally anti-intellectual, anti-scientific. So, even those who got a half-way decent time in school, were delivered a sub-standard education where religious teachings were woven through the weak curriculum.
This kind of disparity still exists, and the South and Mid-West feelings towards intellectualism still persist. Unfortunately, these people realized that the only way to get the entire country to slide down into this abyss of ignorance with them was to go into positions of power in politics and government. Then get someone like Bush elected who will do their bidding to shut them up so he can go build empires elsewhere.
I thought then, and I think now, that public education will continue to be a failure in this country unless I can go from state to state and school district to school district and get the same - and same caliber - education. And that means more federal involvement - meaningful and intelligent federal involvement - and funding comparable to the importance education has for our future.
One of the reasons the US rejected the European standard, according to Jacoby, was that the centralized "federal" board of ed was run by experts - educators and leaders in particular fields of study. THEY would decide on what was studied at each grade level, and what textbooks were used. This ensured a high level of knowledge in the area of quality and quantity.
With local school boards, made up of volunteers (and let's admit it, some people who are just NOT qualified to decide on curriculum and textbooks) the US system varies greatly from town to town, never mind from state to state. Therefore, you get a science curriculum in Kansas that either is extremely weak, or who gives equal time to "intelligent design" and evolution, if the "E" word is mentioned at all. But, you can bet that the science curriculum in Cambridge, MA starts introducing evolution in 1st grade and is extremely strong in the sciences throughout all levels.
Unfortunately, the kids who graduate from the Kansas schools will go into politics....the kids from Cambridge will go into science and be frustrated to death by the kids from Kansas.
A nation of burger flippers and shelf stackers is the inevitable result of exporting industrial jobs to low labour cost nations. Another indictment of globalisation.
To be an engineering craftsman, a carpenter, or a construction tradesman requires intelligence and education but not the same kind of intelligence that excels in the academic world.
The teachers AND the parents. Nothing to do with the politicians who created a society in which all are economic units because the one income family is no longer viable if the income is not coming from somebody in a high earning profession.
You could call it the war on the blue collar class I guess.
Right, neocon economics has always been about the poor subsidising the rich.
I was not in the mood for writing much which is why I linked to Amanda's article but you're right, the issues are much deeper.
Globalisation ripped the hearts out of communities and destroyed the seldom spoken understanding shared by most people; that there is only one world available to us and we have to share it.
The endless quest for tax cuts by the zero tax lobby are just a symptom.
Yes, the teachers and the parents are to blame. Unfortunately, the parents don't get fired or pay reductions when their kids don't pass a test....
Honestly, I think it's people sticking their noses in where they don't belong. That would be like me going and revamping the NBA or something equally ridiculous. Maybe me going and restructuring Google. I have no knowledge about the NBA or Google. I have no knowledge about basketball or computers.... Similarly, the politicians that are responsible for crap like NCLB have NO experience in the school systems. They think they know what will work but without any experience or knowledge about the subject, they really only made it worse. Instead of having this grandiose sense of importance and intelligence, they should be intelligent enough to confer with the experts - the teachers, the parents, the students even. With a little input about what really would keep any child from being left behind (from the ones that are being left behind) imagine what progress could be made!
I would opt for a centralized curriculum established by experts in both education and the various areas of study.
Education like health care and welfare payments for the unemployed is an essential for a civilised socety. One of the problems that arose in the sixties was that all these things became political footballs to be kicked around for party advantage. Britain and America seem to have suffered must because we have two party, adversarial systems.
In Germany for example, the main parties, Social Democrats (the secular party) and the Christian Democrats (the party of Catholicism) cannot form a government without one of the smaller centerist parties as a coalition partner. Thus the extremes always have a moderatinf influence and there is more continuity rather than succeeding governments trying to overturn what the last gang did.
Culture emphasises what we buy not who we are. I've used a similar argument for over thirty years.
But Bush's "No child left behind" is an education policy that works perfectly for a neocon nation. It ensures all children are left on the start line except for the ones whose parents can afford private education or live in elite suburbs where parental support enables schools to function properly.
Sheryl O., Apr 8, 2008, 11:19am EDT
Perhaps my comment was not clear.... I agree - you can't just ask art teachers how schools should be set up. You also cannot just ask pedogogical experts. You need to take experts from all aspects of the schools in order to make sure that the entire schooling experience is going to benefit all children. Imagine creating a school plan without asking counselors or librarians for some input. Or imagine only asking parents what they think schools should have or offer.
But, I would say that asking a group of these people is going to far surpass any 'benefits' the politicians are heralding for their plan.
Sheryl and I have talked in another context of the importance of reading. It starts way back with bedtime stories.
Where modern education falls down bigtime is in its obsession with testing and statistics it finds no time to instil curiosity. On top of this the media and the incessant promotion of cool over school add to the damage.
Finally of course there is the bureaucratic stick interested parent are beaten with. My daughter is thirty. When she was about 14 I helped her with a project by showing her how to research a topic. She turned in an excellent piece only to have it rejected. I received a curt note from the school telling me not to interfere with the school's teaching program. Naturally I queried this and found pupils in the British education system were not allowed to know anything beyond what the curriculum allows.
Exactly, and that is why there are so many social problems involving young people.
Part of the function of education is to teach first that not everybody can be a billionaire and second that everybody who contributes is a values member of society.
The craziness goes deep though. Over the past few years there has been a big drive in the UK to get disabled people back into work. Because I am unable to work through disability I am prevernted from volunteering by the government's benefits agency and my private insurers. I could perhaps give 4 hours a week in a number of areas; computer literacy, literacy, acting as an adviser to people with legal problems etc. But if I gave two hours a week I would be deemed fit to work full time.
And if I worked full time I would probably be dead inside six months.
There are many similar examples of the way bureaucracy always seems to achieve the opposite of what it ought to.
I'm an admirer of Susan Jacoby's work but (perhaps because I'm British) I had not thought of America's educational problems in terms of North East - North West versus Bible Belt. It makes a lot of sense though as I have always said religion thrives on ignorance.
"Meaningful federal involvement," You mean public funding?
BLASPHEMER !!! :-)
Promoting ideas like that you rish being exiled to "ccommie" Europe. Don't worry thjough, we'll welcome you with open arms.
You may be right about the kids from Kansas going into politics (probably via a carerr in preaching and with a PhD in Divinity from University of Sendusthemoney.com but I think the kids from Cambridge Mass. are more likely to go into Investment Bankings and spent their working lives engineering Collateralised Debt Obligation derivitaves.
That's the way the world had gone since the Reagan/Thatcher era.
Politiciand affect a grandiose attitude but really are doing no more than delivering what is on the wish list comiled by their paymasters.
And who are those paymasters? The wealthy neocon elite.
Of course human beings were on earth at the same time as dinosaurs. I almost met a dinosaur once. I was in the Houses of Parliament visiting a friend who was a member and Margaret Thatcher passed not ten yards from me :-)
And you may not have met a dinosaur but you've exchanged comments with one whose mickname starts with B.
(Now, if we could just get the politics out of the space program. *Sigh*)
One thing to note, there's a lot of incentive to keep things local, what with textbook contracts and the like.
Don't you just love Bush's idea to race to Mars?
Any merit to Bush' idea (and it was so vague as to be effectively hot air) will get tossed with whoever comes next and the next long-range but poorly thought out idea will come up so we don't lay off tens of thousands of irreplaceable space experts (who become less expert, sadly, each few years) that will be overset when the administration changes again.
Not that I'm bitter.
I suspect that most parents do not read to their kids much nowadays.
I'm not starting at the bottom and woirking up her but you have got me started on one of my hobby horses. Reading is the most important skill we can be taught in modern society (lighting fires is taken care of by chemistry / technology and snaring / hunting animals by agribusiness) If we can't read adequately we can't understand mathematics or sciences, learn history, find our way around or do anything adequately.
I find it appalling that some people I respect as intelligent will at times complain about my using semi colons and complain about "run on" sentences.
It seems people are being taught that sentences should contain no more than two clauses and words no more than two syllables I thought this came from the Microsoft Grammar Checker but it seems to be the way English is being taught.
Anyone who had read aloud to their kids will understand the importance of puntuations which breaks up the text and pro - (gulp of air) - vides the reader with breath breaks.
Another bad habit is taught in creative writing classes.
Here teachers advise sentences should be short and punchy.
They say this style has more pace.
The pace holds readers and listeners attention.
Quite clearly the idea is wrong.
Too many short sentences are irritating.
They do not hold the attention but bore the readers.
I don't know how such ideas take hold.
We need to rethink teaching techniques.
What holds the reader in a good story or article is a solid narrative structure and variations of pace (or pitch, pace and volume as one of my old English teachers used to insist) Listening to someone who knows how to read aloud is a wonderful aid to delevoping reading skills. I have a record of the actor Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, its a pleasure to listen to over and over again.
Then again, listening to stories read aloud develops imagination. It requires active participation of the of the listener. Children unselfconsciously make movies in their heads and can visualise stories very vividly which, so long as it is not brainwashed out of them at school is able to enhance greatly the pleasure of reading.
Keep politics out of education, absolutely!
But counselling? Do we really want to be letting shrinks loose in schools - that idea is so horrific it takes me back to running with scissors. Who knows what crazy ideas would be planted in kids minds.
If the space program is revived and I think it should be, maybe we could send all the psycholigists to a distant planet, like in the last chapter of Douglas Adams' H2G2 trilogy, Goodbye and Thanks For All The Fish.
Ian and Bert - my family always read aloud as a group in the evening and on road trips. I was the chosen reader since my husband is rather dyslexic and a slow reader and I am a bit of a ham, choosing to put extra drama into the reading (probably far beyond what was in the original mind of the author) and assign humorous voices and accents to the characters. This began when my kids were very young up until they went away to college. Yes, HS kids who loved being read to. Now, I often read aloud to my husband when I have a book club book that I think he would enjoy. I think that it is not just the activity of reading together, but the lesson that reading is very enjoyable, and even more fun when shared. I hope my kids do the same for their own someday - I'm sure they will.
One of my favorite things to hear is, "Are we going to read tonight? Please?"
"Tons of useful stuff can drop out of a space program."
Yeah and most of it seems to land on Australia.
You know if my knee keeps shaping up and I can make my comeback as a standup I'm going to have to hire you as an audience plant to feed me lines.
But seriously folks, we are still reaping the benefits of the last space program including hard wearing alloys, low friction coatings and lubricant additives that reduce engine wear so that where we used to think 100,000 miles from a car engine was better than par, now 200,000 miles is not unusual. (and non stick frying pans that make omelettes easy)
The political point here is that only governments can fund that kind of R&D programme but we fell for the false promises that we could all be rich and now "public investment" means giving money to the private sector to inflate profits.
Get business out of education at all levels. If businessmen want the right calibre of school leaver and university graduate all they need to do is pay their fair share of taxes and leave the rest to the dedication of teachers. Sure, we will still have losers and no-marks, there always will be such people, but on balance I think the education system that prevailed from the 1930s to 50s here in Britain did pretty well as provinding the balance society needed.
Since the "experts" who had spent their lives in Universities theorising about education hijacked the system in the 1970s we have a surfeit of media studies graduates and graphic desingers and are having to import enginerrs and technicians from India and plumbers and electricians from Poland.
You're a frustrated actor like me then?
Yeah and most of it seems to land on Australia. - I heard a drum lick after that one - rurrr-rump-bump-clash!
Yes, I think you've found me out, Ian. I am a frustrated actor.
You should hear my daughter's rant about "Communications" as a major. It's hysterical. We seem to have an over abundance of lawyers in the US.
Plus, it's hard to get bent out of shape with the 20 billion when close to $4 trilliion has been wasted in Iraq and the stealth planes (planes, not spacecraft) are billions each (each!). /Steps off first soapbox
But you're right on the contributions from early space programs. The pity is we've been running around in circles since (yes, yes, I'm you're straight man). There hasn't been meaningful inspiration in NASA since Von Braun left/died. Everything since has been trying to "new and improve" existing stuff and, sorry, we're not as good at it as Japan. Aside from the fact, we don't have the expertise to do more than cheap copies of old breakthroughs, we don't have the will and the freedom to make new ones. Even if someone comes up with something new, no one will use it since we have a track record on existing hardware - even if the track record stinks. (Damn, did I wander back onto my first soapbox?). The early space programs worked because (a) we were damn lucky more didn't fail, (b) the Goddard devotees and Von Braun team were freaking inspired and (c) political direction at that time was largely "go to the moon" and writing checks (OK, maybe there was more political control than that, but it wasn't like today when each new administration scraps any current programs not actually flying and starts over from scratch). Today, we're kind of 0 for 3 on that and, as interest in science and math wanes (except for computers and IT), it will only get worse.
/Really gets off of first soapbox
/Steps on second soapbox
Man, Ian, I am so with you. When I write fiction, I read it all aloud before I show it to anyone. If you can't read it aloud, it probably isn't written well. When people look over it on-line, they're always regurgitating "today's" hard and fast writing rules instead of checking it over to see if it (gasp!) still works, rules or not. *Sigh* I grew up reading novels of many different eras. Poe and Austen routinely wrote paragraphs hundreds of words with clauses attached with semicolons, colons and any other non-period punctuation that suited them. How much of today's trendy literature is going to be read 150 years from now?
/Steps off second soapbox
Glad I can amuse you both. Though, of course, not as much as "communications."
As for lawyers, I personally advocate a 10% mandatory culling via shotgun every five years for all lawyers not on salary (i.e. not judges/prosecutors/public defenders). That way, you'd have to think long and hard about staying in profession. (I love this story: A Dublin lawyer died in poverty and many barristers of the city subscribed to a fund for his funeral. The Lord Chief Justice of Orbury was asked to donate a shilling. "Only a shilling?" exclaimed the man. "Only a shilling to bury an attorney? Here's a guinea; go and bury twenty of them." )
And, Ian, I only meant we need more than scientists making curriculum, but people who understand children, too. Many a scientist/mathemetician/historian/literature expert has diddly understanding of people. Of course, I think that's true of many psychologists, too...
(Sorry about the "communications" thing - it really is viewed as a rather weak major at most schools - sort of like, "well, I could not decide what I really wanted to be, so I majored in communications.")
Great article, Ian. Unfortunately, tax cuts taking precedence over education is happening more and more often in this economy. I just posted a discussion about the persisting achievement gap in the US between black and white students, and it seems to me you might have interesting opinions on that and add a lot to the discussion. If you'd like to and you get a chance, please comment! Here's a link. Thanks!